We are trying to run 4 victor motors. When the robot is not moving, all 4 vicotrs are solid orange.
Full joystick forward, two victors (1 & 2) are red, two are green (3 & 4).
Full joystick back, two victors (1. & 2) are red, have no colour OR sometimes they will flash green (victors 3 & 4)
Also, left on the joystick moves the robot right.
Any ideas?
That sounds like normal operation. Most of the time, when constructing a robot drive train, one side has to run opposite of the other - in order to go forward, one set of motors drives clockwise, while the other drives counterclockwise.
The way the victors work, you’ll get solid orange when they’re receiving a “stop”, or no motion, signal. Full speed in one direction will turn them green, full speed in the other will turn them red. Anywhere between full speed and stop, however, tends to just have the LED off or flashing.
It sounds like you might just have them swapped around a bit… when you push forward, does the robot actually move forward? When you go backwards, does it actually move backwards? As for it turning right when you want it to turn left, it just sounds like you have the motors programmed opposite of what they should be - the right should be the left and the left should be the right in the code.
So, I don’t know why the left-> right thing is happening, but if you have a fairly standard drive train, tank/west coast, then your victors are acting as they should.
Flashing Green: Forward
Solid Orange: Stopped
Flashing Red: Reverse
The right and left side should be opposites, as they are, because your motors are mirrors of each other.
Well, I guess Jon beat me to it, but I do actually have some input on the left/right mix up.
If you pass in a joystick to the built in arcade drive method you will have that problem. I’m not entirely sure why, but you can fix it by passing in the y and x axis as speed and rotation, respectively, yourself.
Something like this should work:
speed = joy.GetY()
rot = joy.GetX()
robotDrive.ArcadeDrive (speed, rot)
Thanks everyone…we figured out the left right issue.
I just had the programmers run all motors the same direction and then inverted the power outputs on two of the Victors so that the positives were hooked up to the negative and vice verse. It works fine, and now full forward gives 4 green.